The Carpool

animals forming unlikely friendships. I recently saw one where a German shepherd raised a bunch of tiny, fluffy ducklings, and the sheer amount of adorableness in that sixty second clip has sustained me for the last two weeks. But of course, dogs and ducks are not the only odd couples in the world. I did a little digging around and I found a story about one of history's most unlikely herrings, a bond between a giant of literature and a literal giant.

The tale begins in nineteen fifty three in the small French village of Mollan, about forty miles outside of Paris. Samuel Beckett's, a famous Irish playwright, had just purchased some land there, and Beckett arrived in France with quite a reputation. You might recognize his name or the title of his most famous play, Waiting for Goodot Beckett was one of the biggest names in the absurdist theater, a genre that

explored existentialism, meaninglessness, and illogical nature in our world. He went on to win the nineteen sixty nine Pulitzer Prize in Literature for his work. In nineteen fifty three, though he was just looking for a quiet place to write. Beckett was a native English speaker, but a big Francophile. He spent a lot of time in Paris and often wrote plays in French, so that's why he decided to

buy land in the French countryside. Once he got there, he realized that he was going to need help building his cottage. He looked to hire some low craftsman, which is how he met a man who lived just down the street, a Belgian born handyman and farmer named Boris Russimov. Boris was happy to offer his services while he worked on building Beckett's new home. The men became close friends.

Even after the playwright's cottage was finished. They kept in touch and Boris sometimes invited Beckett over to play cards. One evening, the playwright sat at the handyman's kitchen table, shuffling the deck. As Beckett dealt the cards, Boris confided in him about something he was struggling with. He said that his son, who was just twelve years old, wouldn't stop growing. He wasn't even a teenager yet, but he was already six feet two inches tall and weighed two

hundred and forty pounds. He was so big that he didn't fit on the school bus, which meant that he had to walk over a mile to class and back every weekday, and Beckett's immediately offered to help. He said that he drove a convertible. If he rolled the top down, there would be plenty of room for Boris's son in the passenger seat. From that point forward, Beckett picked Boris his son up for school each morning and drove him

home each afternoon. This went on for two years until the younger Rusimov quit school at the age of fourteen to work on his dad's farm. Over the next few years, Boris's son just kept growing. When he turned eighteen, he was seven feet four inches tall and weighed over five hundred pounds. As you might imagine, He was a huge help around the farm. They was said that he could do the work of three men all by himself. But after four years of manual labor, he wanted to move on,

and it's hard to blame him. Boris's son knew that his size made him unique. He dreamt of doing something big no pun intended, like maybe working in showbiz. So around nineteen sixty he packed up and he moved to Paris. There he landed a job as a professional wrestler. After establishing himself in France, he moved to the United States, where he joined the Worldwide Wrestling Federation. He quickly became an international star, but his fame would be on the

ring too. He also appeared in movies, most notably the nineteen eighty seven classic The Princess Bride. You see. Boris's Son's name was Andrey Russimov, better known as Andre the Giant. While on set for The Princess Bride, Andrea talked about Samuel Beckett driving him to school. It struck his co stars as a bizarre connection. They asked Andre what he

and Beckett would talk about. I mean, you'd imagine the Pulitzer Prize winning playwrights and a future wrestling star would have plenty to discuss, right Well, Andre said that their conversations were curiously limited. They never mentioned theater, or wrestling, or existentialism. All they ever really talked about was the

game of cricket. In the FBI's vast collection of records, there's a fifteen page file labeled with the name that might surprise you Colonel har Lynn Sanders, as in the man who turned his recipe for Kentucky Fried Chicken into a multimillion dollar fast food empire. Now you might be asking, how did the founder of KFC end up in the FBI's radar. Well, the story is a curious one. Indeed, well starts at the beginning. In eighteen ninety. Sanders was born on a farm in Indiana. His early years were

marked by struggle. His father died when he was six, and his mother had to work multiple jobs to keep the family afloat. As the oldest of three children, Sanders was forced to step up. He started working on the farm and cooking meals for his siblings at just seven years old. I know this sounds like a setup for his future career as a fried chicken salesman, but the Colonel's path wasn't that simple. He had a long way to go before becoming the white haired chef we know today.

When Sanders was twelve, his mom married another man. Apparently this guy wasn't too fond of his step children, and Sanders ended up leaving home. He found work on another farm in Indiana, but life was tough. He went to school in the mornings, then came home, fed the chickens, and shut corn until eight or nine at night. When he reached the seventh grade, thirteen year old Sanders decided that he had had enough of the classroom. He quit school and worked on the farm full time until he

was fifteen years old. Then he started job hopping. He was a streetcar conductor, he joined the army. He worked as a fireman, an insurance agent, a secretary, a steamboat operator, a lighting manufacturer. If there was a job to be done, Colonel Harlan Sanders would do it. In the nineteen thirties, when Sanders was around forty years old, he started cooking as a side hustle. At the time, he was working at a vehicle service station on the edge of a

busy highway in Kentucky. He would cook food in the back room and sell it to travelers who happened to stop by, and the words soon spread that the Colonel's fried chicken, okra and biscuits were worth pulling over for. Seeing this as his newest job opportunity, Sanders quit the service station and opened up his own restaurant, the first ever KFC. Despite his flighty job history, he took this

new endeavor very seriously. A later profile in The New Yorker outlined his goals, saying that the Colonel wanted to create and I quote, fried chicken so golden and delicious that it will bring tears to the eyes of a grown man. Well, I don't know if the drumsticks moved anyone to tears. It was clear that Colonel Sanders had finally found his calling. Over the next few years, he perfected his famous recipe, the one with eleven different herbs

and spices. Right then, for about two decades he focused on expanding his business and establishing franchise locations. Colonel Sanders had gone from an Indiana farmboy to a multi millionaire chicken connoisseur. Now well into his sixties, he put on that white suit, styled his white goatee and played the part of a fast food mogul. But in his heart, Sanders was still a simple countryman. He didn't love the

pressure of running such a large business. In nineteen sixty four, he sold the company for a large one time payout plus a modest yearly salary. And with plenty of money and even more free time on his hands, the colonel soon developed a curious new obsession. Chicken no longer occupied his every waking thought. Instead, he spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about j Edgar Hoover. At the time,

j Edgar Hoover was the director of the FBI. The colonel was a big fan of his policies and his actions. He took to writing what was essentially fan mail, sending Hoover multiple letters of praise once he requested an autographed picture. In nineteen seventy, he invited the FBI director to his eightieth birthday party. If you're curious, it appears that j Edgar Hoover did not attend the shindig. In fact, he

didn't seem to reciprocate the colonel's affections at all. Hoover took every single one of those letters and just put them into an FBI file. But here's the really strange part. Although the file explicitly states that Colonel Sanders was never the subject of an FBI investigation, multiple paragraphs have been redacted, which leaves me wondering what's been covered up. Is it the Colonel's recipe for perfect fried chicken or something more curious.

I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it over at the Worldoflore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.